My Love Hate Relationship with Adobe Illustrator

A while back, I posted an article about my drawing method. Well after a little research, I quickly learned that I would forever be stuck in super amateur mode during that process. Turns out legitimate graphic designers take an entirely different approach to drawing. My original method was a very simple yet not very yielding process. So in response, I guess I decided to upgrade myself from Adobe Photoshop to Adobe Illustrator. In the process, I’m awing in the genius while simultaneously ripping my hair out. It’s not as simple as drawing a circle and filling it with the paint bucket fill tool anymore. There are vectors, paths, anchors, and handles. I’m trying to learn it all and even tried to produce an extremely ambitious project for you guys. But after about 2 hours that yielded me something not very satisfying, I decided I needed to practice a little more with the simple stuff before I tried to go for the advanced things.

Luckily, I’ll use simple enough interface to draw for Universidaze, so I’ll try and use Illustrator for my comics for now on as a means of practice. To promote and test it out, I drew up this quick Miles from Univesidaze in Illustrator and it took me about 10 minutes to draw that. It literally takes me 2 in photoshop, but this is something hopefully practice will help me fix. So that’s my excuse for no legitimate Sunday Sketch, but I’ll include the 2 failed projects below just so you can see how hard I tried for you guys.

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Anyone can use it? OK, if they don’t give a rat’s arse about fine control, precision, etc… basically all the stuff we graphic designers agonise about. Illustrator is a total piece of crap, there’s nothing ‘intuitive’ about it, it’s like working in a pond of sh*t. Until late last yearI was working on a G5 Mac because that was the last version of Mac hardware that would run Freehand. But in the end I had to upgrade and BAH!! Everything takes four times a long! There’s no fine control, you just kind of throw vector paths, primitives (squares, rectangles, etc) and type at the screen and hope it sticks somewhere. Grab a shape or point on a path and carefully position it on screen. Then bump it. Ooops!

In their infinite wisdom Adobe has thrown out the best vector drawing package ever written (Freehand) and dragged all Freehand users, kicking and screaming, into the Illustrator camp. Adobe had the monopoly on vector graphics, there is no second choice (for Mac users at least).

If you learned to use it before Photoshop, than I’d imagine it would be easier, but I’ve been using the classic “Draw and Fill” for a couple of years now. Illustrator has turned my world upside down! But my drawings do look significantly better and cleaner…Let me know how you feel when you start in a post or something and link me back to it, I’ll be sure to read your opinion on the matter.